A former UK National Crime Agency (NCA) officer has been ordered to repay more than £1.8 million after stealing 50 bitcoin that had been seized during a criminal investigation.

Paul Chowles, 44, from Bristol, was part of an NCA team investigating Thomas White, who was convicted in 2019 for running the dark web marketplace Silk Road 2.0.

Chowles helped investigators examine digital devices and recover bitcoin linked to the case. But while working on the investigation, he secretly took 50 BTC from a wallet that had been seized by the authorities.

The bitcoin was worth about £60,000 when it was stolen in 2017. Its value later increased sharply as the price of bitcoin rose.

A court has now ordered Chowles to repay £1,810,678.93. Of the stolen bitcoin, 30 BTC were later recovered from him. Chowles is already serving a prison sentence for the crime.

In 2025, he was sentenced to five years and six months after pleading guilty to theft, transferring criminal property and concealing criminal property.

During the investigation into White, authorities seized 97 bitcoin stored in a digital wallet.
The wallet was kept under the control of the NCA while the investigation continued.

Investigators later discovered that 50 of the 97 bitcoin had disappeared.

At first, authorities suspected that White himself had somehow accessed the wallet. White denied taking the bitcoin and repeatedly said someone inside the NCA must have stolen them.

The truth eventually emerged years later.

In May 2017, Chowles transferred 50 BTC from White's wallet to an address he controlled. He then split the bitcoin into smaller amounts and moved them through Bitcoin Fog, a mixing service that was designed to make digital asset transactions harder to follow.

He also converted some of the stolen bitcoin into regular money and spent around £140,000 on everyday expenses, including shopping, restaurants, building work and nursery fees.

For several years, investigators could not determine what had happened to the missing Bitcoin. By late 2021, the coins were considered untraceable.

The investigation changed after White continued to insist that someone within the NCA had taken them. Merseyside Police eventually began investigating the allegation, which led to Chowles’ arrest in May 2022.

Investigators found devices linking him to the stolen bitcoin. They also discovered notebooks containing usernames and passwords connected to White's digital asset accounts.

Authorities eventually recovered 30 of the 50 stolen bitcoin from Chowles.

When Chowles stole the 50 bitcoin, they were worth roughly £60,000. At a later point, the same 50 bitcoin were valued at more than £4 million.

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said the increase in bitcoin's value played a major role in the amount involved in the confiscation proceedings.

The court ultimately found that Chowles had £1,810,678.93 available to pay and ordered him to hand over that amount.

The confiscation order is separate from his prison sentence. Its purpose is to recover money and assets linked to the proceeds of his crime.

Luke Clements, a specialist prosecutor at the CPS Proceeds of Crime Division, said Chowles had "exploited a position of trust for personal gain."

He added, "Confiscation Orders are a powerful tool in ensuring that crime does not pay." The case also highlights the importance of security when authorities seize digital assets.

Bitcoin can be moved between wallets without physically moving anything. Anyone with access to the private keys can potentially transfer the funds. In this case, the blockchain also helped investigators follow the movement of the stolen bitcoin after it left the seized wallet.

The Chowles case began with 97 bitcoin seized from a suspect. Fifty were secretly taken by an officer investigating the case, and 30 were eventually recovered.

What began as a theft worth around £60,000 became a multimillion-pound case because of bitcoin's rise in value.